63 Months Jail, $34 Million in Restitution Payments for Singapore National's Role in GDMA Scandal

The US Department of Justice has handed down another sentence in the Glenn Marine scandal. 

Singapore national Alex Wisidagama, former global manager of government contracts, Glenn Defense Marine Asia (GDMA), has been sentenced to 63 months in jail for his part in a fraudulent billing scheme that saw the Navy over charged $34 million for ship husbandry services, including through artificially inflated bunker prices, the US Department of Justice has said.

In addition to the jail sentence, U.S. District Judge for the Southern District of California, Janis L. Sammartino, in the March 18 ruling also ordered Wisidagama to pay $34.8 million in restitution to the Navy.

Wisidagama is the third defendant to be sentenced in the long-running GDMA fraud and corruption scheme.

According to admissions made as part of his plea agreement, Wisidagama and his cousin, Malaysian national, Leonard Glenn Francis, CEO, GDMA, perpetrated a scheme to defraud the U.S. Navy on ship husbanding contracts by, among other things, over-billing for the sale of goods, fuel, and port tariffs.

Records were said to show that GDMA's contracts with the U.S. Navy allowed it to sell certain categories of supplies for which GDMA was the lowest bidder.

To make it appear that GDMA's prices were competitive, Wisidagama admitted that he and others created false price quotations purporting to be from third-party vendors and submitted them to the U.S. Navy.

Because the contracts forbade GDMA from making up the price of fuel that it supplied to U.S. Navy ships, Wisidagama admitted that he and his conspirators created false invoices purporting to show that GDMA paid more to purchase fuel than was actually the case, allowing GDMA to build undisclosed markups into the prices at which it supplied fuel to the U.S. Navy.

Wisidagama pleaded guilty in March of 2014, having admitted that the scheme caused more than $34 million in total losses to the U.S. Navy.

To date ten individuals have been charged in connection with this scheme; of those, nine have pleaded guilty, including Malaki, Commander Michael Vannak Khem Misiewicz, Captain Daniel Dusek, NCIS Special Agent John Beliveau, Commander Jose Luis Sanchez and U.S. Navy Petty Officer First Class Dan Layug.

As Ship & Bunker reported last year, former Department of Defense civilian employee Paul Simpkins was the ninth person to be charged in the case; he currently awaits trial.